With mobility beginning to overshadow images as a key factor in media, this paper will review the way the screen has been thought of through the succession of modern visual media, and the current cultural place of moving images. It asks, again, as André Bazin, that old photo-realist theorist, did — what is (the) cinema? Or, more contemporaneously, where is the cinema? It will track the various ages and stages which surround the development of modern media, especially that of the so-called four screens — from the first screen (silver — the movies), second (the tube — channels of discourse), the third (monitor — interactive sites), to the fourth screen (mobile — i-screen), and the various conceptions of these cultural spaces. Screens are also increasingly socially networked. To co-opt Katherine Hayles adage about print media — screens are flat, code is deep. The paper will therefore explore the influence of recent technologies of extensibility, database, and adaptive methods, and the perception of their accompanying media logics, on the moving image production and distribution ‘food chain’. The paper will develop this analysis of the emergent properties of the contemporary cinematic arts through notions of story space, as developed in the literary arts, and of new media data spaces, as formed within the computing ‘crafts’, in formulating a view of the current meta-media structuring framework, and the emerging/future shape/s of cinematic culture/s.